If you’ve been following this blog, you’d know that my mom took her own life after battling a bout of depression a few years ago. She did a lot of planning to take her own life, right to the details on how she wanted her funeral to be handled and the location of the receipt for the niche to put her ash. I had to go through her suicide notes, and the most difficult thing that I had to contend, was to learn that she’d been planning for her death all the while being normal to us and I was unknowingly appointed to handle the aftermath of her death. (she did say sorry to me in her notes for that).

One of the things that I had to do (that wasn’t part of the note), was to dispose of the car she died in. It was parked at that very location for many days, way after her funeral. I was the one who bought the car for her, and drove it back from Perak from the used car dealer. Wasn’t a great car but, was practical. The morning that my mom disappeared, we were toiling in worry to search for this car, and none of us found it until the gardener noticed it hidden in a basement with the engine running and inside it, my mom’s body. The car was in a mess when we got back to it after the funeral. Its interior was filled with the odor of gas fumes and it had broken glass in its interior (rescuers had to break the window to get to my mom). Out of obligation, one of my mom’s brothers offered to sell off the car for us, so he drove it off to a used car dealer somewhere and was disposed of for an insignificant sum of money. Out of grief, I did not feel like taking the money so, I donated all of it to a charity organization. I never saw that car again after signing the documents at the used car dealer that day.

Fast forward 7 years later, about a few weeks ago… this car made an appearance right in front of our apartment’s guard house. My wife Emily was the first to notice it, and she alerted me. “Dear, I saw your mom’s car outside our apartment! How did it end up back here?”
“That’s just a sheer coincidence”

It made a few more appearances outside our apartment compound, and was no longer seen again… until a week ago, it was parked at a parking lot right across my car. Apparently, the person who had bought the car that my mom died in 7 years ago, moved to the apartment unit at our ground floor, which has a parking lot right across my parking space. What are the odds of that happening? So many people in Penang and so many apartments to move to, and it ended up right across where I can see it all the time. And now, I get a grim reminder of how my mom looked like when she was in her rigor mortis state whenever I get home from work every day… I just hope my mom won’t appear in it and flag me over to have a chat… Because that’s just wrong, that car is no longer hers, goddamn it.